State of Today’s Mushroom

Todayâ€™s mushroom carries around a copy of The Third Bear. Due to constant interruptions, todayâ€™s mushroom has not even finished reading the first story.

Todayâ€™s mushroom wonders. Is the bear a hero or a villain? In this story, the bear wreaks havoc.What is the third bear thinking?

Once the story leaves the writer, the story belongs to the reader. What the reader thinks of the story, how the story affects the reader, how the reader engages with the story, these are things out of the writerâ€™s control. Was it the writerâ€™s intention for me to think about the third bear as the hero in his own story? I donâ€™t know. I haven’t finished the story yet. Perhaps there are no heroes in this story, perhaps there are more than one. What is a hero anyway? Â And do I really need heroes for me to like a story?

Today’s mushroom considers heroes. Are heroes tasty?Â If I mixed them in with my soup, will heroes make me heroic too? Heroes and the consumption thereof . . . hold that thought. Ha, ha.

Today’s mushroom is having an attack of absurd melancholy. It happens even to the best of mushrooms. But heroes. . . yes . . . perhaps heroes have those too. Who are your heroes and if you consumed them what would they taste like to you?

Todayâ€™s mushroom wanders off to read some more. Hopefully, the mushroom will finish reading this story before more interruptions occur.

**updated to say: I finished reading the first story. A five star story, definitely awesome. Off to read more.

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Comments

Heros taste like corn-dogs at a state fair: ground up bits of assorted meat and meaty bi-products, stuffed into a costume, dipped in angsty batter, and deep fried till golden brown on the outside, steamy on the inside. They’re not good for you in large doses (especially on the postprandial Hurlinatorâ„¢), but they provide great childhood memories and guilty pleasures, even when you account for the sodium crypto-nitrite preservatives et al..

I figured that mushrooms would escape the Theber’s notice (hope I spelled that right. The book is downstairs so I can’t check). Also, I had the fungi-squid hegemony on my mind and poof…somewhere along the way, I transformed. Must say, the state of being a mushroom isn’t a bad state to be in.

Todd, I will definitely make a point not to ride the postprandial hurlinator after consuming several heroes. Maybe heroes should come with a health warning. Something like: Heroes. Consume with moderation. he, he.

He,he.Or “Warning,may contain heroes.And possibly nuts.”On the back of the shining armour.

About Jeff VanderMeer

Photo by Kyle Cassidy

Jeff VanderMeer has been named the 2016-2017 Trias Writer-in-Residence for Hobart-William Smith College. His most recent fiction is the NYT-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance) from FSG, which won the Shirley Jackson Award. The trilogy also prompted the New Yorker to call the author “the weird Thoreau” and has been acquired by publishers in 28 other countries, with Paramount Pictures acquiring the movie rights. VanderMeer’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Atlantic.com, Vulture, Esquire.com, and the Los Angeles Times. He has taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference, lectured at MIT, Brown, and the Library of Congress, and serves as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen writing camp . His forthcoming novel from Farrar, Straus and Giroux is titled Borne. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, the noted editor Ann VanderMeer. You can contact him at pressinfo at vandermeercreative.com. (Author photo by Kyle Cassidy.) More...